Fife Honor LectureCopyright (c) 2017 Utah State University All rights reserved.http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/fife_honor
Recent documents in Fife Honor Lectureen-usThu, 15 Jun 2017 13:48:32 PDT3600“I Done What I Could”: Occupational Folk Poetry in the Pacific Northwesthttp://digitalcommons.usu.edu/fife_honor/3
http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/fife_honor/3Thu, 20 Oct 2016 10:55:10 PDT
The dangers and difficulties of certain challenging occupations are sometimes expressed in the tradition of composing and reciting poems, often in the traditional ballad-form of rhymed couplets. This tradition, best-known in the cowboy poetry of the American West, also occurs among occupational groups and seems to have survived to a greater extent in the Pacific Northwest.
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Jens Lund2014 Fife Honor Lecturehttp://digitalcommons.usu.edu/fife_honor/2
http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/fife_honor/2Tue, 23 Dec 2014 09:31:33 PSTPeggy BulgerTwo Faces of Folklore: The Ludic and the Commemorativehttp://digitalcommons.usu.edu/fife_honor/1
http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/fife_honor/1Fri, 06 Jan 2012 08:30:15 PST
Drawing inspiration from Austin and Alta Fife, who had a hand in assembling that marvelous volume, Lore of Faith and Folly, I pursue in this lecture the contrasting threads of faith and folly in the guise of two folkloric moves, the ludic and the commemorative. The ludic takes us into a realm of playful irreverence, and my examples here come from the domain of nicknaming with its disfigurations of name and character. The commemorative takes us into the realm of reverence, and my examples here come from the domain of heroic song, specifically, the corrido, a popular ballad form in Mexico and among Mexican-Americans. Our quest indicates that folklore – that zone of human behavior where people come together to engage in performances whose blueprint is contained in local knowledge and whose production is marked by heightened attention to style – offers possibilities of either lowering or elevating its objects of reference. In spite of these contrasting intentions, both the ludic and the commemorative perform the same kinds of operations on their materials, operations that reassemble communicative resources to create new and arresting effects. In the process, through this lowering or raising up of referents, these two faces of folklore take us to the core of what it means to be human.
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John H. McDowell